Explaining A Postcard To A Sex Therapist

Every photographer’s dilemma: when something dramatic unfolds before his eyes, does he stand back and observe - get the picture? Or intervene – act - and loose the image?

At noon on April 25^th 1985, on the Schlossberg, a cliff overlooking Freiburg, I see a woman about to slit her wrist. I dash over, grab her by the shoulders - take her in my arms. She fights me off. Must have thought I was going to push her over the edge, not, pull her back from it. Some Saviour. I came over more as a pervert. She hadn’t been cutting her wrist. There was no knife. I’d saved her from reading a postcard.

That evening I explain what happened, to a sex therapist and a hydrologist (a couple I’m staying with). They find the whole thing hilarious. No matter how I explain it I can’t make them see how I mistook a postcard for a knife.

I bore a sex therapist and a hydrologist to tears, but not before we’ve agreed to rendezvous on the Schlossberg the next day at noon, to re-enact the scene. This time I'm the photographer, and the sex therapist plays me. The hydrologist plays the role of the wrist-slitter, and the most difficult role, that of the postcard, is played by a knife. 

Flooded, Drowned Cars, Bern.

Two By Two

It’s as if the fire-vans have aged into fire-trucks. Time’s moved on, but they’ve stood still: expecting a fire; waiting for the flood.

God instructed Noah to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female... After they entered the ark, rain fell on the earth for a period of forty days and forty nights. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days, and everything thing on the face of the earth was wiped out... Finally after an entire year, God invited Noah to come out of the ark. Immediately, he built an altar and worshiped the Lord with burnt offerings from some of the clean animals. God was pleased with the offerings and promised never again to destroy all the living creatures as he had just done. Later God established a covenant with Noah: "Never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth."As a sign of this everlasting covenant God set a rainbow in the clouds. Genesis 6:1-9:7

Drowned Firemen, Bern

Water-Damaged Firemen

Water-damaged Firemen is a ‘found’ (rescued, saved?) archive of vernacular images – 35mm slide-transparencies - of firemen, taken by firemen. The photographs depict the day-to-day life of a fire-fighting crew based at a fire station in Switzerland, over a period of twenty or so years, from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s. The images fall roughly into the following categories: major fires; dramatic rescues; poles descended; ladders extended; towering infernos ascended; road-crashes attended; water fired; various training exercises; new fire trucks; charred remains of rooms and personal belonging; burnt-out buildings; portraits of firemen, smiling. In all there are some 300 drowned transparencies, of which only a handful survive intact.

The entire archive –lives licked by flames - was ruined when a water pipe burst, flooding the basement of the fire station in which they were housed. As the photographs are 35mm slide-transparencies, no prints or negatives exist: these, the originals, are water-damaged beyond repair.

The equivalent: an archive of ‘scorched scuba divers’, rescued from a houseboat fire. Fire-eaten frogmen, toasted coral, burnt fish, skeletal shipwrecks. Fire-damaged frogmen, like water-damaged firemen, must exist - be swimming around out there, somewhere? 

Sheltering Eye

After photographing a bird’s nest, and having my photograph taken by (from) a bird’s nest (see last blog), I walk down through the forest, back into Basel. I pass a tram stop, then, a bus shelter. If I swap the advertising photographs on these shelters, for the photographs I made - no more than a few hours ago - in the mountain shelter, I’ve got another case of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’.

Bird's-Eye View

Walking in the Black Forest (cuckoo clock country), I pass a mountain hut - but it looks more like a bird box. Later – deeper in the forest – I come upon a second hut. This hut houses a bird’s nest. The bird has a spider for a next-door-neighbour. Both homes are empty – they must be out at work. I work out. I work out the best way to photograph the nest, is by hanging – spider-like – from the overhanging roof of the hut. It is from this position – part bird, part spider, that I photograph the nest and web.

Then, I house my camera in the bird’s nest, set the self-timer and let the nest photograph me in the position I photographed the nest from: a bird’s-eye view of a wildlife photographer – part-bird, part-spider.